ZAGREB, February 17, 2019 – The Office of President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović on Saturday denied the claim by her former domestic policy adviser Mate Radeljić that she had promised to Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic that she would not use the terms “Greater Serbia aggression” and “the Srebrenica genocide” in her public speeches.
“There is no need to again answer questions about which there is no doubt whatsoever. What happened in the 1990s was aggression on Croatia in the name of Greater Serbia policy, and an international tribunal has qualified the crimes committed in Srebrenica as genocide and no one with good intentions questions that,” spokeswoman for the President’s Office Ivana Crnić said.
Radeljić told the RTL commercial television channel that the Croatian president had promised to her Serbian counterpart that she would not use the terms “Greater Serbian aggression” and “the Srebrenica genocide”.
RTL asked Radeljić who the president was referring to when she said at a press conference earlier on Saturday that she was wrong about the “For the Homeland Ready” salute because one of her advisers had told her that it was a historical Croatian greeting. “It turns out that the president was some sort of a puppet of her advisers. I don’t know who she was referring to and it would have been nice if she had said who she meant,” Radeljić said.
Radeljić then wondered if any of her advisers told her after Vučić’s visit to Croatia last year to give an instruction that the two terms should not be used in any of her public speeches.
“She personally told me after Aleksandar Vučić’s visit that she did not want the term Greater Serbia aggression or the Srebrenica genocide to be used in public speeches because she had promised that to Aleksandar Vučić. Let her deny this now and blame it on her advisers,” Radeljić said.
Radeljić claimed that Grabar-Kitarović had not used the two terms in any of her speeches after the Serbian president’s visit. However, some media have found that this is not true and that the Croatian president used the term “Greater Serbia aggression”.
More news on the relations between Croatia and Serbia can be found in the Politics section.
